Chrome August’s big winner as Internet Explorer resumes slide

Internet Explorer has failed to gain market share for the third month in a row …

As browser competition continues to heat up, 2010 looks like the year when the market was repeatedly disrupted. Internet Explorer has not managed to gain share for a third month in a row. Firefox is leveling out while Chrome and Safari continue to grow. Opera? It's hanging on to relevance.

Between July and August, Internet Explorer dropped 0.34 percent, a drop smaller than June's or July's gain. Firefox, meanwhile, went up 0.02 percent, Chrome gained 0.36 percent, Safari was up 0.07, and Opera dipped 0.08 percent.

IE looks stuck around the 60 percent mark for the time being. At least it's still above its lowest point (59.69 percent) with its best chance of market share gains in the short term coming with the IE9 beta, and the back-to-school season.

The importance of being the default browser in the world's most popular operating system continues to help IE. Microsoft browsers are being used by more than 6 out of 10 people and IE8 is being used by more than one in four on the Web (quickly closing in on one in three)—it is now at 27.90 percent (over 30 percent if Compatibility Mode is included). Unfortunately for Web developers everywhere, IE6 continues to be more popular than IE7, though this month it declined more than its successor. IE6's share can be attributed to businesses still using customized intranet applications, and XP's much bigger installed base than Vista's (especially in developing countries).

If we take a look at the last 12 months, the stabilization of IE is really obvious. Firefox, meanwhile, remains far away from what may be the unreachable 25 percent mark, having lost all the share it gained in the last year. Its market share is actually lower than it was a year ago. Chrome's progress is very noticeable in the chart above, though it seems to have found resistance at the 7 percent mark. Safari's gains are at about 1 percentage point, while Opera's are almost insignificant.

As always, things at Ars are very different. There was no place-changing this time: Firefox continues to dominate, Chrome is second, Safari is third, IE is fourth, and Opera brings up the rear. Last month, Firefox gained share, as did Chrome and Opera. The first-party browsers, Safari and IE, both dropped.

First paragraph: "Internet Explorer has not managed to gain share for a third month in a row."Second paragraph: "Internet Explorer dropped 0.34 percent, a drop smaller than June's or July's gain."Given the previous month's write ups, I'm assuming the 2nd is correct.

First paragraph: "Internet Explorer has not managed to gain share for a third month in a row."Second paragraph: "Internet Explorer dropped 0.34 percent, a drop smaller than June's or July's gain."Given the previous month's write ups, I'm assuming the 2nd is correct.

Go Chrome!

Both are correct. The first paragraph sentence was intended to read:After gaining for two months, IE's loss failed to make it a "three in a row".

Get back to us when Chrome has actual double digit marketshare. Crowing over a sub 10% share, is just ridiculous.

This seems kind of obstinate. For 2010, Chrome has an average MOM growth rate of 5.08%, which puts them at 10.12% overall marketshare come February of 2011. Chrome suddenly doesn't matter for web development until six months from now? I'd rather be ahead of that curve.

Entirely hypothetical, but if Google maintains growth, Chrome will surpass Firefox in late 2012 and break 30% in January of 2013.

IE6 is has more market share than Chrome, Safari, and Opera combined. Hehehe. I wonder how much of that is due to corporate users, and how much is due to home users not knowing any better.

On our centrally managed desktops, we have finally upgraded to IE 7. So that is about 5000 less IE 6 machines out there.

They could not go to 8 because several apps break with IE 8.

The current "web" is a miserable, broken environment that needs to be shit-canned as soon as possible. html+css+script+http and all its horrible crapness is utter stupidity for an application platform, leading to the problems mentioned in the above quote. The amount of time and brain power being wasted is staggering.

Whether Firefox makes 25% doesn't concern me. What matters is that the increased competition forced MS to get off their lazy asses. I've never liked IE, but as long as they aren't holding back the web's evolution as badly as they were during IE6's total domination, I will deign to allow them to be the majority browser. Chrome is good competition for Firefox, as well, which Opera sadly couldn't really do.

Chrome is a terrific browser, I use it almost full time at home and work. I never thought it would break 1%, but hey, look at it go.

why would you think that? anyone who uses the Google search engine is going to see the ad for Google Chrome every time they access the site. 7% is actually low when you think about it.

I hadn't seen the ads. Maybe because it knows I've been using chrome almost since it was released.

Installing a separate program just for web browsing when you're already using a perfectly capable one seems like something most people wouldn't bother to do. Ars users and our ilk are not representative of most people on the internet. That's why it's surprising to me.

The current "web" is a miserable, broken environment that needs to be shit-canned as soon as possible. html+css+script+http and all its horrible crapness is utter stupidity for an application platform

THIS! Its atrocious esp. since it is completely unnecessary. The only reason we need web "applications" is the crapness of application management in todays Operating Systems esp. Windows with all the security and performance implications of installing an application to your desktop. If there was a proper sandbox with the ability of clean removal and no trashing up your registry whatever of downloaded applications like they are for example provided by iphone apps we wouldn't need web apps. We could use any cross platform development environment like Java (or whatever) and develop applications in a decent way.

But no instead we need to use something that was intended to display static content and twist and turn it until we can redo things that are really simple with a proper programming language.

Interesting. I just uninstalled Chrome yesterday. It wouldn't play nice in XP mode on my 64 bit Win7 work laptop. The webpage that would lock up the most was... (drum roll)... Gmail.

Somewhat similar experience here. I'm a graduate student and am using IE 8 by choice on my 64-bit Win7 laptop. Chrome is the only other browser I have installed and I have used it periodically for the past year but just uninstalled it this morning for 2 main reasons, among others...

1) I don't feel any speed increases when loading websites I regularly visit (yes, I cleared IE's cache before making comparisons). Maybe it's just the websites I happen to visit, but I don't experience what many people describe as Chrome's "speediness".2) It is absolutely (exaggeration... kinda) useless for Google Docs--sometimes locking up, but mostly just taking a very long time to load (much longer than IE 8 takes).

I love the way Opera has a tiny marketshare overall, and then when you get to the Ars specific marketshare... it still has a tiny marketshare, while every other non-IE browser has increased significantly.

Who cares. By the time IE is dethroned as the market-share leader, we'll all be dead. Ars has been saying such and such browser has been gaining on IE for many years now, but nothing is even close yet. In the meantime, focus on new features in browsers and advancements with HTML standards rather than how many corporate schmucks use what browser.

If there was a proper sandbox with the ability of clean removal and no trashing up your registry whatever of downloaded applications like they are for example provided by iphone apps we wouldn't need web apps. We could use any cross platform development environment like Java (or whatever) and develop applications in a decent way.

In other words, what we need is the evil, evil Flash which everyone thinks Must Be Destroyed?

(As a side note, after Oracle decided to sue Google over Android, it might not be the best time to float the whole "hey, let's make everything in Java!" meme.)

Adblocking and privacy protections are the killer app on web browsers and Firefox does these the best. So they get my "business".*

Chrome is pretty slick and IE8 has some cool feature (in an otherwise inscrutable interface) but Google and Microsoft both have incentive problems. Google wants to scan my retina and sell the data to marketers. Microsoft wants to lock me into their OS and has little interest in cross-platform development. Only Firefox is giving their browser away out of the goodness of their heart. And trying to put it onto any available device (with sync).

Ironically, it seems the whole thing (Mozilla) is bankrolled on that tiny search box in the corner of Firefox. If I choose Google then they pay for my browser. If I choose Bing, then Microsoft does.

* Sorry Ars. I love you guys but the flashing ads were getting on my nerves today so I've enabled Adblocker again.

I always wonder if Minefield (prerelease builds of Firefox) count as Firefox in browser share rankings. I bet this past season has seen the greatest rise in Minefield use due to the exciting upcoming Firefox 4 release.

Not to say I think it impossible that Firefox is just doing poorly--I understand Chrome and IE8 have big user bases. But I am surprised people aren't jumping on the Firefox 4 hype... Mozilla has shown recently, more than ever, how awesome a company they are.

I just hope as Gecko tightens up XPCOM and such, Firefox can boast its speed once again.

No, the reason why we need web applications is because they can be delivered from the cloud (the internets itself) and have a consistent GUI. There is no unified base GUI for most of the desktops/notebook/touch screen (including iPhone, iPad, etc) devices out there. Even using a toolkit like GTK+ requires your program to be an event driven mess that has to use the shitty data structures that they provide. Given reasonable web development, all I have to do is take the input of your request and barf out some reasonable html, combine that with a preconfigured CSS and any required javascript. What's even better is simply have some base markup (HTML) that never changes and have the javascript shit out the required messages. Also one should just redirect Internet Explorer of any version to whatever crap site you wish after n warnings to use a browser of the 21st century. IE6 doesn't count even though it was released with Windows XP because it was already a POS from the dark ages.--- END TRANSMISSION ---

I like the visualization Ars used this time for IE version share vs. all browser share. I think it avoided a lot of confused comments.

You're counting iDevices running mobile Safari under Safari, yes? Maybe it's too much detail for this type of article, but I find it really interesting to look at the OS + Browser combo for my website. It turns out that we have more iPad users than Opera users, and Firefox for mac and linux have significant presence whereas the huge majority of Chrome users are on Windows.

I'm currently Firefox + Chrome from my portable hdd. Well, actually I have 67 programs, mostly have at least a tentative relation to my job. Up until this year they were IE6. They are still a IE only shop, but I've had less problems than the blokes that use IE.

I have personally used Firefox as my primary browser for several years, but have recently switched to Chrome. Firefox needs to speed up. I have especially always been annoyed by how the entire browser locks up for several seconds when you want download something. I have a quad core Intel i7 920, 6GB RAM and Intel 160GB G2 SSD. Firefox 4 looks promising though, but that downloading issue is still there.

Get back to us when Chrome has actual double digit marketshare. Crowing over a sub 10% share, is just ridiculous.

It's a new browser and it's not preinstalled in any operating system. Moreover, it's significant because Chrome changed the concept of internet browsing: from large and bulky to simple and lightweight (not to mention from slow to fast and sandboxing in general). Look at FF4.0 and the upcoming IE9.0 Betas if you don't believe me.

Who cares. By the time IE is dethroned as the market-share leader, we'll all be dead. Ars has been saying such and such browser has been gaining on IE for many years now, but nothing is even close yet. In the meantime, focus on new features in browsers and advancements with HTML standards rather than how many corporate schmucks use what browser.

It would be great if IE would start making their browsers easily upgradable for corporations. Allow them to leave their customizations in place and unphased by any upgrading. That way the latest standards can be implemented and companies are without excuse for running fail browsers.

If there was a proper sandbox with the ability of clean removal and no trashing up your registry whatever of downloaded applications like they are for example provided by iphone apps we wouldn't need web apps. We could use any cross platform development environment like Java (or whatever) and develop applications in a decent way.

In other words, what we need is the evil, evil Flash which everyone thinks Must Be Destroyed?

(As a side note, after Oracle decided to sue Google over Android, it might not be the best time to float the whole "hey, let's make everything in Java!" meme.)

Yuck. Unless a special case is presented, I wish every site would just use standard HTML and CSS. And the excuses not to seem to be slimming with HTML 5 and CSS3 protocols. I hate using flash and the java web apps I've seen have been worse. Google documents/calendar/etc illustrates the power HTML/CSS/Jscript apps can have.

Off topic: I think it would be cool, however, if Google offered a desktop version of its softwares that populated its data from the cloud. Kind of like how I can use Gmail on the internet or pull it up with my Thunderbird desktop client.